1. Field
The following description relates to a digital content managing apparatus and method. More particularly, this description relates to an apparatus and method which provide digital interactive content and user requested data in real time.
2. Description of the Related Art
A story is a series of events. “Narrative” is used as a synonym of “story” but further implies a story told from one or more points of view. A narrative includes a plot that is a sequence of events conceived to achieve artistic or emotional effects where the underlying story may change in terms of discovery and dramatic effect according to composition of the plot. That is, various narratives are possible within one story.
With such properties, a narrator tends to make a story exciting by recomposing a sequence of events or focusing more significantly on a certain event while observing a listener's response. For instance, a human narrator may respond to a listener's curiosity with respect to contents, such as period background of an event, a character, the past, etc., based on the narrator's own background, knowledge, or creativity even though such contents are not included in the original story. In this case, it may be said that a story space is open.
Similarly, a digital interactive story has contents where a story varies depending on interaction between a user and a system. Technology has been developed to transfer the role of telling a story from a human narrator to a computer narrator. However, a conventional computer narrator is not aware of contents outside of an original given story and thus cannot respond to a user's curiosity that wanders from the original given content. Thus, it may be said that this story space is closed.
Planning is used to automatically organize the plot of a digital interactive story. Planning is technology that plans a route to reach a goal state from a current state. Main elements constituting planning may include a node, a pre-condition, a post-condition, a planning algorithm, etc.
The node is a situation or a state of a story, and the pre-condition of each node is a condition that has to be satisfied before reaching the node concerned. The post-condition is a condition that has to be satisfied after reaching the node concerned, and is also called an effect from the point of view of updating the current state. Meanwhile, a planning algorithm is an algorithm used to make a plan to achieve a goal state from a current state, and is roughly classified into a forward planning algorithm and a backward planning algorithm.
The forward planning algorithm retrieves a node whose pre-condition is regarded as a post-condition of a current node from the current node and searches for a path to a target node to reach the target node. The backward planning algorithm retrieves a node whose post-condition is regarded as a pre-condition of a target node from the target node and searches for a path to a current node to reach the target node.
In the case that the digital interactive story is composed through planning, the pre-condition and the post-condition of each node are generally effective only within a content area that an author wants to represent. If a user requests other contents that do not exist in an area of contents while watching/listening to the contents, desired content units cannot be linked properly even though they may exist in another content area making it impossible to recompose and provide only necessary content units. That is, conventional planning technology is limited in that it provides the user with plots of the story composed only within one content area.
At present, in the case that a user watches and listens to contents on the Internet, the user uses a method of selecting contents through a web search and watching/listening to the selected contents. In this case, a user has to repeat processes of selecting the contents through the web search and watching/listening to the selected contents whenever the unit of contents is finished, because the story space is closed.